Mother and Son

By Stephen van Beek

April 21, 2001

She had spent all her life feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul.
Nabokov in Speak, Memory

I first realized the power of Sokurov’s 1997 release, Mother and Son when, about two years after my own mother’s death-a death whose impact I was reluctant to acknowledge-I saw it in a retrospective of great films of the 1990s, hosted by Cinematheque down at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

I elected to see the film on the strength of a single image from the film, the mother and the son in a distorted focus against tall grasses.

And the experience moved me greatly. I dreamed about the film without being able to know why I was dreaming about it. And I found I did not understand what I had witnessed, nor what it meant for me. Not knowing what to make of it, I resorted to waiting. When on vacation, memories floated to mind, and I wrote them down when I returned. This exercise brought me closer to the mood  I was in upon seeing Mother and Son, but I seemed to be not much further ahead in clarity.

About a week later,  I  decided read the Cinematheque program notes:

“ 73 heartaching, luminescent minutes of pure cinema”(according to Paul Schrader).
 Never has one seen images quite like these before, nor experienced in the cinema a mood as simultaneously tranquil and engulfing. A young man tends his dying mother in an isolated decrepit country cabin. The son is parent to the helpless, infirm mother, tenderly attending to her every need. Sokurov has called the intense bond between the two a  “kind of love which is serene, and does not need to search elsewhere.” 
Their final time together culminates in one of the most moving in contemporary cinema, a reverse Pieta set against an autumnal landscape under a brooding sky. 

Sokurov has said that “Mother and Son is two different pictures-one a visual film, the other a sound film.” On both levels, it is a magnificent achievement. The film’s soundscape-the murmuring voices of mother and son, exaggerated noises of nature, and music (snatches of Glinka and Verdi)-make apparent Sokurov’s belief that “ the sound is my soul”.

Visually the film is unlike any other. Drawing on the tradition of 19th-century Romantic landscape painting, particularly the saturnine works of Caspar David Friedrich, Sokurov treats each image as a painterly composition. The strange hallucinatory obscurities and distortions, achieved through the use of mirrors and glass filters, unconventional application of the anamorphic lens, and hand-painting evoke a world of timeless, penumbral calm. (The images’ flatness makes the screen a kind of canvas aswirl with fading light, smeared, ethereal colours, and attenuated meteorological effects.) Rarely have cinema and painting been so commensurate.

“ A masterpiece…Sokurov outdoes all previous efforts with this astonishing chamber piece. A movie of incredible stillness, Mother and Son evokes overwhelming solitude amid creation….Watching it is like watching the last sunset”. (according to  J . Hoberman in The Village Voice)

I found myself agreeing with a lot of that but still kept feeling cloudy about my own responses. Before I go on, let me say that I know that how I am going about this commentary reveals a great deal about my own need to find a stable meaning, and possibly to invent one ot fill the void.

Western critics seem have five general responses:

1)	It is about the deep affection of a mother and son, without which life is necessarily comfortless;
2)	it is a political commentary on the death of the formidable security of the Russian state, explaining why it got banned in the USSR itself;
3)	it is a modern Passion, in which the suffering god is the bereaved son;
4)	it is about spiritual oppression and the absence of a connection with the divine in a secular society that has lost its roots in materialism;
5)	 it is about the vulnerability of human bodily existence.

These responses  speak to the obvious content of plot and style. But I kept on feeling jumbled up inside, just as I feel when a psychotherapy client is deeply involved in some aspect of his inner world. I found myself unable to explain my own responses to myself. Yes, I suffer the need for an explanation that I can articulate.

I also realized that I was struggling to deal with the power of Sokurov’s technique itself, not just the storyline, whatever that might be. A great deal has been said about Sokurov’s elaborate cinematic techniques to render the natural unnatural and thus present it to us with the majesty and awe which we lose in our ordinary life. 

He is famous for his slow long shots that oblige us to gaze in silence at a scene. Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos and many others use this technique, of course, so that a meaning can surface or sink in. Gaze shots suspend time, the way time can be suspended in the space of a session.

Sokurov also distorts and twists sound both natural and musical. And as we shall see, it is true of his treatments of plot sources. 

Sokurov  is generally acknowledged as the aesthetic and spiritual heir of Tarkovsky, and therefore of the line that stretches all the way back to Eisenstein himself. He has dared to make unusual films on unusual topics. He has unusual gifts in terms of utilizing the icons of Russian culture, for example having the son wear a Tolstoy shirt, and introducing the train as a mode of situating us in time and in history. The train, by the way, was the means by which the Bolsheviks defeated the Whites, and also the major means of propagandizing for support, using trains as mobile troop carriers and as cinemas.

So his professed view of  what is about Mother and Son seem very odd. He has said that  the love in the film is a “kind of love which is serene, and does not need to search elsewhere.”

And consider this:

‘According to Sokurov the relationship between mother and son is the most complicated love- relationship there is. He admits it’s a sort of rapport that is more difficult to understand for the Westerner. Sokurov "This particular parent and child have the intimacy of lovers. They seem to live in a magical, self-enclosed world all of their own. Even in Russia such relationships are rare." Sokurov asked about his own mother: "My mother is a very patient, soft, kind mother,… I’m lucky my mother is a tender and soulful woman."’

Is that the kind of mother we are shown in the film?  What is going on in the film, where there are very few activities? Considering attachment:

•	Is the film about the process of anticipated and actual mourning arising from death?
•	Is it about the agony of an individuating separation?
•	Is it about a mother who is so wonderful that she cannot be let to die when she must? Why is her dying so significant to him, if he has attained a level of adult detachment from this affectional anchor?
•	Or about a mother whose imperfections leave her son longing for a reparative gesture before all such hope is lost?
•	Or is it about the simple and inescapable fact that a son carries part of his mother with him throughout hi entire existence? 

Very little happens in Mother and Son in terms of external action. Here the action is all implied and involved in the mind.. Just consider what activities go on, and how much occurs in silence.

What actually happens such that we can say we observed it?  We see two people awake, discuss a  dream, go to sit outside on a bench and examine a souvenir album, take a walk, interrupted by long pauses, return to the house to  warm themselves and eat. Afterwards the son one goes out while the mother rests. He returns having, it seems,  realized that his mother will die. When he returns to her, we do not know whether she is dead or merely asleep when he tries to blow away the dead moth from her hands. Significantly, he lies down in much the same position at which the film begins. 

And there is talk, some talk, though very little, but very little talk for the actual length of the film. Much of the time the mother and son do not speak to each other, and do not look at each other. It’s really not much to go on in terms of explaining the impact the film makes, is it?

It feels like hearing a set of events, rather than seeing them. We feel the moods and the life inside.

In our work, we tend to be drawn by items that we believe matter especially to our client. Here is my list for Mother and Son:

•	The discussion of the dream, especially the repetition of the poem
•	Outside on the bench looking at and reading old postcards
•	The dialogue during the long pause beside the path
•	The  interplay between caregiver and patient including feeding dialogue
•	His solitary walk and return

The Dream

At the outset we see two figures, the mother appearing to be buried in the ground, the son draped around her head.

The first words we hear are familiar ones: ‘Last night I dreamed…”

The son awakes and tells his mother of a harrowing dream in which he was pursued by a stranger, whom he finally confronts, and who asks him to recite some lines, His mother says she knows the lines and recites:

I am seized by a suffocating nightmare
I awake terror-stricken, covered in sweat
God, dwelling in my soul, affects only my consciousness.
He never extends beyond me to the outer world… to the course of things.

Her son repeats the words and they sink into something very like a joint trance. This trance state is almost uninterrupted for the rest of the film.

Finally another line is uttered:

My heart is heavy from such imperfection.

This poem serves as gateway to the film. I knew, as one knows in dreams, that these words rang a distant bell, but I could not place them because something seemed to be left out, just as in a dream.

Alexei Jankowski, Sokurov’s assistant, wrote me that this is a quotation from the first scene of Pasternak’s version in Russian of Goethe’s Faust Part One, just before he attempts to invoke a spirit directing in order to escape from his own desperation. 

More questions. Why not quote a homegrown poet from among the great line that sprang from Pushkin? Is this simply a way of increasing a sense of strangeness?

And why Faust? Invoking Faust means dragging in a whole supernatural and cultural apparatus. You recall the original legend: the learned doctor, miserable despite his accomplishments, makes a pact with the devil; 24 years of bliss in exchange for his soul. 

And there was something odd in the poem, they failed to complete the thoughts of their original. The last line goes something like this:

“I have cast away my life and wait full of anguish for my death”

You have to accept that Russian viewers would know this from their own personal knowledge of Pasternak’ hugely celebrated translation. The impact of the poem is then more obvious:

I am seized by a suffocating nightmare
I awake terror-stricken, covered in sweat
God, dwelling in my soul, affects only my consciousness.
He never extends beyond me to the outer world… to the course of things.
My heart is heavy from such imperfection.
“I have cast away my life and wait full of anguish for my death”

Incidentally, I have checked out the phrase ‘heavy with such imperfection’ and it is more accurately understood as “ burdened with such incompleteness”

There is a very important theme in Russian literature of the Romantic period, influenced by Wilhelm von Humboldt, that perhaps justifies part of the allusion to a German legend. Humboldt wrote that any truth spoken from the heart was necessarily distorted and even a lie to some extent. It was Pushkin, of course, who first began challenging Russians about their incapacity to express themselves in their native tongue because they were so captivated by foreign languages. I guess Sokurov though Pushkin would be too obvious a point of reference.

Think for a moment about the issues of truth and non-truth we face in attempting to understand our inner dialogue, or what is said to us by others, including clients. Tukachev put the problem neatly: “ A thought expressed is a lie”.

Maybe the idea here is that we can be more truthful in a language that is not our own. 
We cannot bear to express ultimate personal truths, so we attempt to use foreign tongues to free our selves from our knowledge that we hide ourselves in our own speech, which can in this view never be authentic. I would include analytic, object-relational, Daseinsanalytical, alternate consciousness and other psychological theories in this.

I believe we must treat the aesthetic tradition seriously here. recall that the fictional Dr. Zhivago was critical of Soviet history and of course was also banned in its day. Translating Faust enabled Pasternak to criticize the regime obliquely. And the plot line of Dr. Zhivago is basically the plot-line of Mother and Son, treading a path first marked by Pushkin. 

Pasternak said Pushkin was his model because he showed the simple individual life as the best. He felt that the purpose of art was to “reveal the sublimity of life and the unfathomable values of human existence.” Faust, conversely, is about the our human tendency to resort to the grandiose when we cannot attain the level of the ordinary. Faust strives to speak the language of sorcery when his own words cannot create the life he desires

Dr Zhivago-who starts out with all possible advantages- is made to write "Every man is born a Faust, with a longing to grasp and experience and express everything in the world”

He comes to find how words fail us in our attempt to say who we are:

"Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!"

He and his beloved Lara part because people are not able to connect when they obey their natures. 

So within Mother and Son we move in a slow spiral of layered textures and meanings. I should add that Goethe immensely improves the legend by making the contract with the devil depend on Faust’s ever once admitting that the things the devil can do actually make him happy, If he does that, the devil wins, and he is doomed for ever.

 If you think I am making too much of the Pasternak connection, note that the son has the same snub-nose chiseled face as Pasternak which is so often mentioned as an autobiographical element in Zhivago.

Back to the dream sequence  now: after this recitation the son says “we have the same dreams.” How much more merged can he be with her? If and when she dies, what must become of him?

Caregiver and Patient

He attempts to care for her and she is a reluctant patient. Who is the child?     

Or what kind of a parent was she when he needed tending? Late in the film he tells her not to bug him (weevil is the translation, comically)and our colleague Michael Blugerman has suggested that this is a hint that mother was always capricious and difficult for him as a child.

The Postcards

He tenderly places her on the bench, tenderly covers her. Do you recall how apprehensive and unsure he was both leaving her for the photo album, and returning?  

We are given a lingering shot of mother on the bench as if to ask whether she is still alive. And it is hard to know.

Suddenly she starts up out of her doze,  looking into the sky, crying “Who is it there?” He replies “Nobody. There is nobody up there.”

Now, very much the child of a depressive parent, he tries to jolly her along with happy memories of the past when a young beau came courting her.

Interesting, isn’t it, that Sokurov has offered us the most lasting theme of Western aesthetics, the love of a mother and a male child, so redolent of the Christ story. A mother and a son, not a daughter, nor a father and a son, let alone a daughter. This gives real meaning to the reading of postcards from an old beau. Where was father? Perhaps we are meant to see the death of the son in the absence of a father. 

We are also meant to think of the profound mystery of the creation myth embodied in Western culture by the absence of a father. Having such a drama of death between a mother and a son speaks to the intergenerational transition in a way that no other combination can in our culture. Of course, in terms of Slavic culture generally it is also an allusion to the tie to the land, to history, and even, given the fact that this film was made in recent years, to the death of an old and familiar security in a known system of governance. 

They pause in their walk on the side of a hill, she dozes off, and both end up looking off in opposite directions, as if foretelling the final parting. 

His Early Fears

He then tells her how he feared she would not return from the school where she worked each day, that he felt she practically lived there, that he yearned to get a satisfactory mark from her. In response she says she was afraid they –whoever they are-would take him away from her. 

Howver, nothing is said to enlighten us further about this comment. Then he adds “I burned with shame.” She says nothing. My guess is that this is  an echo of Zhivago,  who devotes considerable attention to the plight of the parentless children, and to the girl Zhivago fathers and abandons. His own daughter Tania is called Tania Fatherless.

One wonders how much care and love and affectionate regard his mother had for him if he could end up with this memory, and this humiliation. She says and does nothing now at the close of her life to do anything about his anxiety.

Her fear of Dying

Back from the walk, after he has offered her food and tried to settle her in, she confesses her fear of dying.

He objects “Who’s making you die?” 
She replies bitterly, “You, you!
Then she exclaims “What’s the point of living?” 
He replies “No particular reason, people live for no particular reason, but they die for a reason.” 

Pasternak presents Zhivago as that of the so-called ‘superfluous man’, the man whose internal existence is aesthetically out of touch witht e tenor of his age, and who wastes his life in emotions that are beneath him. This is a theme stretching back to Pushkin. The love of Lara and Dr. Zhivago is at cross-purposes with their conceptions of duty, and we see I that book the tragedy involved when the matchless, soulful and powerful earth-woman of the Russian literary tradition meets up with one who cannot hold her.
Then she says she has a reason for dying, though she will not say it. He is silent, he cannot pursue this painful topic.

They drift of into trivialities around new clothes, and she ends up telling him how he was born on a cold bright day and so was born clever but heartless. Hardly comforting, and not what we have seen in the young man so far.

Then the following dialogue:

She: Your life was hard at times but hard is not always bad.
He: You and I, we love each other.
She: I feel so sorry for you. It’s enough to make me cry. It wrings my heart.
He: You are afraid I will be left alone.
She: One can live alone, it’s no disaster. You will still have to go through all I have suffered, It’s so unfair.
He: Go to sleep…(clearly he cannot continue in this vein.)

The tone is elegiac, but remote and distant when she speaks, and her references are more about her suffering than his. Notice that she does not tell him she shares in his love or that she loves him. She is on her own path.

Then he goes out and has a walk, and in this walk, alone, he recognizes, as if struck by a thunderbolt , the fact of his coming aloneness in the world. By the strong trees he kneels and weeps, having seen that marvelous shot of the two ships passing each other out on the horizon, reminiscent of the moth that his mother is playing with.

And perhaps he is like that moth himself, hovering around a cold flame that kept him and perhaps the agony of his realization has to do with his fuller recognition of the little he had in the relationship that he had , now formally ending in the physical end of his mother.

And things are not simple. He cannot easily dismiss the past, any more than he can blow away the dead moth still grasped in his mother’s dead fingers. He must force it away to free it. This may stand as an emblem of his own struggle to get away from her.

The poem speaks truly of her dilemma:

God, dwelling in my soul, affects only my consciousness.
He never extends beyond me to the outer world… to the course of things.

The little that we humans can do in the face of inevitable suffering she cannot, or will not, do.

Equally, he cannot get from his consciousness into hers. And we may reflect that the quasi-erotic he attempts with her is his effort to unify with her, as a small child twines close to an indifferent parent.

Conclusion

My reluctant conclusion is that Sokurov is describing a film other than the one he created.

Mother and Son is not really a sentimental portrait of deep affection bonding, but an agony of attempts to be together just as what little there is, is falling apart irrevocably. 

There is nobody up there in the sky, and the two of them are conflicted even in their attempts to be with each other. This is why the film carries such a punch, for it tells us how difficult it is to be with another when the chips are truly down. 

She ends her life largely incapable of responding to her child on a level of adult affection or even maternal devotion. No wonder why we all acknowledge as rare and blessed those moments when the dying and the living are reconciled and drawn together.

This, I believe, is what the film has such power. It is the essence of human existence that we never have time to completely get it right. We are always incomplete in our dealings with others, and eventually there is not even time in which to put the things we know are not at rights to rights again, and to perfect our parts. 

Thus, the truth of that stupendous poem:

I am seized by a suffocating nightmare
I awake terror-stricken, covered in sweat
God, dwelling in my soul, affects only my consciousness.
He never extends beyond me to the outer world… to the course of things
My heart is heavy from such imperfection.

It leaves us to consider whether life needs to be experienced with such utter misery. Our work seems to indicate that there are better ways, yet we always work with those who are not our loved ones, and this may be why such successes we notice are able to occur.